Assignment 2: Creating Visualizations with Existing Visualization Software

From Visualization Sp06

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Assignment Due: February 9, 2006


Image:TableauCrime.png

A wide variety of digital tools have been designed to help users visually explore data sets and confirm or disconfirm hypotheses about the data. The task in this assignment is to use an existing visualization tool to formulate and answer a specific question about a data set of your choice. After answering the question you should create a final visualization that is designed to present the answer to your question to others. You should maintain a web notebook that documents all the steps you performed from start to finish. The goal of this assignment is not to develop a new visualization tool, but to understand better the process of creating the visualization.

Here is one way to start.

  • Step 1. Pick a domain that you are interested in.
    Some good possibilities might be the physical properties of chemical elements, the types of stars, or the human genome. Feel free to use an example from your own research, but do not pick an example that you already have created visualizations for.
  • Step 2. Pose a question that you would like to answer.
    For example: Is there a relationship between melting point and atomic number? Are the brightness and color of stars correlated? Are there different patterns of nucleotides in different regions in human DNA?
  • Step 3. Find a database that has the data you need to answer your question.
    Look for databases in convenient formats such as Excel or a CSV file. The web contains a lot of raw data. In some cases you will need to convert the data to a format you can use. Format conversion is a big part of visualization research so it is worth learning techniques for doing such conversions. Although it is best to find a data set you are especially interested in, here are pointers to a few datasets:

Online Datasets

You may need to iterate through these steps a few times. It may be challenging to find both an interesting question and a dataset that has the information that you need to answer that question.

After you have a question and a dataset, construct a visualization that provides an answer to your question. As you construct the visualization you may find that your question evolves - often it will become more specific. Once you have answered the question to your satisfaction, think of a way to present the answer as clearly as possible. In this assignment, you should use existing visualization software tools. You may find it beneficial to use more than one tool.

We recommend using either Tableau and/or Spotfire because they support many different ways to interact with the data. Both companies have given us licenses so that you can install (talk to Maneesh or Jeff for the password) the software on your own computer.

Other visualization software options include: charting in Excel; plotting using Matlab; or Photoshop's image processing. If you need access to this software, let us know and we will try to arrange it. A goal of this assignment to learn and evaluate a new visualization tool. Therefore, at least one of the tools you use should be new to you (e.g. if you have experience using Microsoft Excel and you use it for this assignment you should also make use of another tool in addition to Excel).

Before starting, write down the question clearly. And, as you go, maintain a wiki notebook of what you had to do to construct the visualization. Include in the notebook where you got the data, and documentation about the format of the dataset. Describe any transformations or rearrangements of the dataset that you needed to perform; in particular, describe how you got the data into the format needed by the visualization system. Keep copies of any intermediate visualizations that helped you refine your question. After you have constructed the final visualization for presenting your answer, write a caption and a paragraph describing the visualization, and how it answers the question you posed. Think of the figure, the caption and the text as material you might include in a research paper.

Your assignment must be posted to the wiki before class on February 9, 2006.

Here are a few examples from the class I taught last year at UW

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How to create your wiki page

Begin by creating a new wiki page for this assignment. The title of the page should be of the form:

A2-FirstnameLastname.

Replace Firstname and Lastname with your real first and last names. You can create the page by entering a url of the following form into your browser:

http://eyeball.cs.berkeley.edu/cs294-10-sp06/A2-FirstnameLastname

To upload images to the wiki, first create a link for the image of the form [[Image:image_name.jpg]] (replacing image_name.jpg with a unique image name for use by the server). This will create a link you can follow that will then allow you to upload the image. Alternatively, you can use the "Upload file" link in the toolbox to upload the image first, and then subsequently create a link to it on your wiki page.

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Add a link to your finished reports here

One you are finished editing the page, add a link to it here with full name as the link text. The wiki syntax will look like this: *[[A2-FirstnameLastname|Firstname Lastname]]. Hit the edit button for this section to see how I created the link for my name.


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